Friday, September 09, 2005

Search team member: several abnormal Pileateds in the Cache area

A reader emailed me this link to a very detailed article (updated 6/9/2005) in the Arkansas Times. The article contains a lot of fascinating tidbits, but this was most interesting to me:
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Arkansas State University professor of wildlife ecology Jim Bednarz has seen several pileated woodpeckers with an abnormal amount of white wing feathers in the Cache River refuge. With Team Elvis, he pursued three birds that showed a flash of white in flight and white on their backs as they were perched. All were pileated.
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Bednarz, though he believes there is an isolated population of pileated woodpeckers in the Cache river bottoms who have an uncharacteristic amount of white on their wing feathers, said the Luneau video has left “no question in my mind that it’s an ivory-billed woodpecker.”
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I've written about this issue previously here.